Orlando Health facility celebrates through art
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Orlando Health St. Cloud Hospital and St. Cloud native Brian Wetzel talks about the hospital’s beneficial impact to the community over the last 60 years. PHOTO/TERRY LLOYD -
How St. Cloud Hospital looked during its 1964 opening. SUBMITTED PHOTO
Considering St. Cloud’s population was listed as 4,353 residents in the 1960 census, and with Kissimmee and Orlando only a few minutes away thanks to low traffic volume at the time, it is hard to believe a hospital was constructed in the town by 1964.
Last week, the hospital leadership and staff marked the 60th anniversary of the now Orlando Health St. Cloud Hospital, with some help from the St. Cloud Boys & Girls Club.
“Achieving 60 years of caring for the residents of St. Cloud within this facility is a remarkable milestone,” said Brian Wetzel, President of Orlando Health St. Cloud Hospital, who grew up in the town. “It’s touching to think about the number of people, patients, and families, who have been helped, in often very difficult times, over those six decades.”
Artwork celebrating the hospital made by children from the Boys & Girls Club now decorates the windows by the hospital cafeteria.
Efforts to build the hospital started in the late 1950s, with residents and winter visitors making donations to a hospital foundation construction fund. In 1957, two actions occurred that finally made the dream a reality. Carl Kiekhaefer, founder of the Kiekhaefer Corporation (now Mercury Marine), agreed to construct the facility at cost through the corporation’s construction arm and provided generous personal monetary donations to make the project possible. Second, the City of St. Cloud dedicated a 10-acre parcel of land to the hospital foundation.
In 1964, as the facility construction neared completion, the Catholic Dioceses of St. Augustine, which included the St. Cloud area, agreed to assume the hospital foundation’s mortgage debt and operate the hospital through the Sisters of the Order of St. Joseph. The 25-bed hospital opened on March 19, 1964, and the next day the first patient, 86-yearold Frank Hinkhouse, was admitted. By the end of the year, the new facility saw 1,122 patients admitted, including 383 emergency room patients, and 81 babies entered the world at the hospital.
The facility today is an 84-bed acute care hospital, with comprehensive emergency, inpatient, and outpatient care. Specialties available include cardiology, critical care, infectious disease, pulmonology, orthopedics, radiology, and full surgical services, plus outpatient Rehabilitation Services and a Wound Healing & Hyperbaric Center.
If it hurts, it can be treated in St. Cloud. Soon, the hospital will add two state-of-the-art cardiac catheterization laboratory procedure rooms and a new 10-bed intensive care unit. To make room for the development, the hospital’s helipad was relocated to the west side of the campus, and extra parking spaces were added to accommodate the growth.
For more information on the Orlando Health St. Cloud Hospital, visit bit.ly/ 3Vp2gEg.
